Thursday, September 22, 2011

The Changing Phiz of Poetry: The Man of a Thousand Faces

In 1925, the Lakewood Products Co. of Cleveland, Ohio, patented the cute and interactive "Mov-I-Graff" toy pictured here—a postcard-sized piece of cardboard featuring "The Man of a Thousand Faces" in profile. When you gently wiggle or "vibrate" the postcard, a thin chain making up his nose and chin area moves back and forth to create ever new profiles. As an ad for the product in the January 9, 1943, Billboard magazine explained, "It's the Mov-I-Graff Cartoon Greeting Card built around a figure of a person. However, instead of a drawn face, a small chain is attached from the forehead to the neck. By holding the card in one hand and tapping it lightly with the other, the face of the character takes various and odd shapes." If you're dying to see The Man of a Thousand Faces in action, skip ahead to the video at the end of this posting.

It appears that the rights to the Mov-I-Graff were eventually purchased around 1943 by the Weinman Brothers (the Billboard ad quoted above announces the addition to its product line), which was perhaps the same Weinman Brothers that was founded in 1912 and launched a jewelry collection in partnership with Lauren Bacall in 2007. Whether or not the length of chain that makes up the Man of a Thousand Face's profile evolved into a necklace endorsed by Bacall, it is clear the object had commercial appeal. As the version of the toy pictured here indicates, it became a premium give-away advertising item—a sort of business card used by O.A. Brown of New Hampshire to promote his business installing Sunbeam Cabinet Heaters.

Other companies took a page out of Brown's playbook. Kingan Meats of Indianapolis used the Mov-I-Graff to advertise its "reliable" hams and bacon. Marion Power Shovel Company of Marion, Ohio, dug its own niche in the market the same way. And Goodyear advertised a lawn hose and golf balls via the Man with the Thousand Faces as well. As the Mitchner Investment Company's use of the Mov-I-Graff (pictured above) suggests, companies asking potential customers to shift brand loyalties no doubt found an appealing and even instructional figure for the nature of that change in the shifting profile of El Hombre himself. "You can't change your face," Mitchner's card reads, "But you can change your fortune."

The subject of change- ability is at the center of a poetic version of the Mov-I-Graff card (pictured here) that the P&PC Acquisitions Department had the good fortune of obtaining via eBay recently. Via the poem, this card transforms the Man of a Thousand Faces into a 1920s hipster bohemian—a satiric male version of the decade's New Woman, perhaps, complete with blush on his cheek, hipster attire, and a bobbed haircut:

They christened me the Mov-i-graff—Because, they said, I made them laughI do not know just why it isUnless it is my changing phiz.

I always try to look my bestAnd am polite in any test;The latest things in duds I wear—I even bob my lovely hair.

Certainly, this version of the card works to discredit the New Man of the 1920s, casting him as effeminate, queer, clueless, and—as the chain forming his profile perhaps dramatizes—delicate, droopy and unreliable; he's a man of a thousand faces, not a model of masculine consistency exemplified by what in the 1950s would become his cultural opposite, the Marlboro Man, who also wears a hat and shirt with collar, who we also frequently see in profile, and whose high cheekbones seem to preclude any fashionable or girly changing of his phiz.

The interns at the P&PC office are quite taken with that word—phiz—and not just because they discovered it for the first time two or three months ago on the back of a photo from the nineteenth century's Jersey Shore. In the present context, they've pointed out, phiz combines with other colloquial words such as duds and bob to create a neat little record of 1920s slang. (Note: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word bob was first applied to women's haircuts in 1918 when Punch noted the "alarming speed of bobbing.") Reading the card today, they're not only struck by how language changes (where, oh where, has phiz gone?), but also how, in this context, the Mov-I-Graff discredits popular linguistic innovation—and thus the changing nature of language more broadly—by associating it with the effeminate, dandy-esque Man of a Thousand Faces. That is, like the chain that forms his phiz, the language he uses is fluid, changing, dynamic, queer, effeminate, and probably, by extension, downright un-American. The Marlboro Man—repository of constant manliness, firmness, tradition, and a man of few words—would never be caught talking like that!

We think our interns are onto something, don't you? While change in one sphere of people's activity—switching from one brand to another brand in the consumer marketplace—is encouraged, changing the way we speak and thus challenging the authority of established language practices (see English-only debates, for example, or the history of gender-inclusive language) is not. In fact, in the context of this poem, the etymologies of both bob and duds suggest as much. Originally from the Old French and Middle English, bob has also been used to mean "to befool, mock, deceive" and "to cheat." Similarly, dud (of unknown origin) has been used to describe "a counterfeit thing applied to any useless or inefficient person or thing." In the very fabric of its poem, then, this Mov-I-Graff postcard indicts the Man of a Thousand Faces as a fool, a cheat, and a counterfeit; his character reveals itself not just in what he wears, but in the very slanguage he speaks.

But that's how the "they" of the poem—a they that represents itself as the voice of common sense, convention, and social norms—wants us to view Mr. Man. We here at P&PC want to view him more sympathetically. In his bob, his duds, and his changing phiz, the Man of a Thousand Faces is not himself a fool (except in the Shakespearean sense, perhaps) but is in fact mocking, fooling, cheating, deceiving, unsettling and revealing as counterfeit mainstream values of standard language use and gender identity; indeed, insofar as it is nearly impossible for him to have the same face twice, he disrupts what Judith Butler would call the interability of gender identity—that "regularized and constrained repetition of norms" on which normative gender identities depend. In his "lovely" bobbed hair and blushing phiz, then, the Man of a Thousand Faces may well be one of the first drag queens of American poetry. Is it possible, then, that his popularity in the mid-twentieth century tells us more about the American public's desire than first meets the eye?

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About Me

Further thoughts on the intersection of poetry and popular culture: this being a record of one man's journey into good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries, and other instances of poetic language or linguistic insight across multiple media in American culture primarily but not solely since the Civil War

"Mike Chasar's brilliant, witty book is the definitive guide to the growing field of American popular poetry. Empowered by prodigious research and informed by thorough knowledge of the traditional poetry canon, Chasar's five chapters take us deep into the way poetry functioned in the lives of ordinary people." — Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

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"Burma-Shave quatrains, newspaper columns, scrapbooks with thousands of stanzas held together by affection and paste, folksy, pseudonymous, nationally famous radio hosts and the fans who sent them an avalanche of homemade verse: these are just some of the materials taken seriously in Mike Chasar’s extraordinarily memorable, and likely influential, study of popular American verse, and of the popular culture that grew up around it, for most of the twentieth century. Chasar combines the painstaking, arduous archival methods of real historians with the close analyses that we expect from literary critics, applied to verse, to images, and to informative prose ephemera. He persuasively links Williams Carlos Williams’s innovations to roadside signs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the Hallmark card; he may change how you see some eminent writers’ work. Even more than that, however, Chasar should get twenty-first-century readers to sit up and notice the uses that so many Americans, only a couple of generations ago, found for the poetry that they enjoyed. Or, to take up a mode that Chasar appears to be the first to analyze: THIS OLD-TIME VERSE/ HAS LOTS TO SAY/ IF YOU CAN READ IT/ CHASAR’S WAY. His book is an ambitious, serious claim on present-day literary studies; it’s also a surprise, and a delight." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

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"As Bob Dylan put it, 'We have our ideas about poets,' and we certainly have our ideas about poetry. Lately, those ideas have led to a national outcry in favor of bringing poetry back into American public life. But in Everyday Reading, Mike Chasarshows us that if we can rethink our ideas about poets and poetry, we will find that poems have always been part and parcel of modern life. This is an important—really, a necessary—book for anyone interested in modern poetics, in the history of reading, in the many appearances of poetry in the era of its supposed disappearance." — Virginia Jackson, University of California Irvine, author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

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"This breakthrough study convincingly shows that American poetry in the opening decades of the twentieth century, far from being a largely elitist product that appealed to a limited audience, circulated among a number of different readers to a remarkable degree and left its traces in surprising areas." — Edward Brunner, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Cold War Poetry

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"The lyric spring will never cease creating an emotional pressure, sought after by every searching consciousness—this is what Mike Chasar ... has shown in his book Everyday Reading" — Marina Zagidullina, New Literary Observer

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"[T]he originality of Chasar's close readings, the sheer amount of research informing each chapter, and the speculations on what can be learned from such careful analyses of popular cultural practices make Everyday Reading not so everyday and well worth reading." — Lisa Steinman, The Journal of American History

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"[The] tension between the poetic and the popular is the crux of Chasar's fun and thoughtful book. Chasar is a literary archaeologist. He excavates the poetry in Burma Shave ads, literary scrapbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, old time radio shows, and yes, even Hallmark cards. His close reading of [Paul] Engle's poem 'Easter' as well as the reproduction of the actual card is genius. His thesis is that early-twentieth-century market culture was saturated with poetry (as opposed to 'Poetry') that was participatory rather than exclusionary. This emotional interactivity with poetry, Chasar posits, set the stage for the bizarre matrix of media, commerce, and culture that would come to define the second half of the twentieth century." — Dean Rader, American Literature

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"Everyday Reading goes far in illustrating how poetry played a much larger role in most Americans' lives than it does today. Chasar paints a picture of a more various and ultimately dissident American public than most might have expected, a public for whom poetry was a crucial part of an overall strategy to counter the dominant political, economic, and social paradigms of their era. Written beautifully and researched meticulously, Everyday Reading will prove an important resource for political and cultural historians, literary scholars, and anyone else interested in how poetry transcends the page and becomes an active part of how we spend our days." — Daniel Kane, Journal of American Studies

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"Highly recommended." — Choice

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"Everyday Reading is sure to act as a touchstone for scholars interested in popular digital literature as well as the contemporary avant-garde....[It] concludes with a flourish: an anecdote about the author's grandmother's use of clipped poetry in wartime letters to her husband that evidences Chasar's arguments while remaining personal and poignant. It is a fitting moment for a book that is so innovative, important, and constantly successful" — David Levine, CollegeLiterature

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"Scrapbooking, which appears in other chapters following the first one, becomes the controlling metaphor for Chasar's study—and for reading habits today. With so many cultural products driven by individual tastes and various engines of a global economy, readers inevitably select and construct their own 'tradition,' which may have much or little to do with what they have been taught is important. Chasar's well-documented, thoughtful book offers the larger picture of this phenomenon, of which the battle for the best is only part of the story." — Rhonda Pettit, Reception

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"A brilliantly written book, startling the reader with his thorough research and analysis" — Sheila Erwin, Portland Book Review

Now Available from the University of Iowa Press

"[Poetry after Cultural Studies] should become an important part of debates about what poets do, what their poems are good for." — Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry